The Hawai?i Nature Center located right on the outskirts of urban Honolulu has been connecting kids to nature for nearly 40 years. But now under the pandemic, the center has become an outdoor classroom for keiki wanting more than what virtual learning has to offer.
A half a dozen or so kids in face masks and tabis crisscross the Kanealole Stream in Makiki Valley dipping their nets in and hoping for a shrimp or maybe a guppy.
Another group explores the meadow hoping to catch butterflies, grasshoppers, and other bugs.
MERRYN: This one, this one - I caught him. He's called a kaydidid.
YUJIN: I have in my jar, that's a bigger kaydidid.
Those are 8-year-olds Merryn and Yujin. Merryn is a veteran of the Hawai?i Nature Center. She’s been coming since last summer.
"Yeah, it?s quite fun actually," says Merryn, "What I?m trying to do right now has been trying to catch the butterflies right there."
She shares her swooping secrets with Yujin, who’s only been here for a week.
Both keiki spend half the day here says Todd Cullison, Executive Director of the Hawai?i Nature Center.
"What we see is a lot of growth there with the families that have decided that home school is a better option or that their schools get out early enough on the virtual learning day is that there's not a lot else for them to do," says Cullison, "So they're able to come up here."
The weekday Outdoors EdVenture Program offers science-based environmental education to keiki ages 6 to 11. Something parent Leon Geschwind appreciates.
"I mean once we went 100 percent distance learning like this fall obviously like a lot of kids I mean we realized the importance and value of being outdoors and kind of what outdoors means to the kids," says Geschwind.
He’s been sending his 6-year-old daughter Anna here at least once a week since last summer.
"Before she wouldn’t want to necessarily touch bugs or be afraid of bugs. Now, she’s all over them," says Geschwind, "She’s picking up the Jackson chameleons and like “Daddy look there’s a cockroach!” There’s all kinds of things of her wanting to get involved with nature."
The Hawai?i Nature Center has connected more than a million keiki to the outdoors over the past 40 years at its headquarters in Makiki as well as ??ao Valley on Maui. Historically, the center has been occupied mostly by school groups on the weekdays, with other keiki coming in on summer or spring breaks.
Cullison is working to expand the center’s reach to kids of all ages and their ‘ohana. Looking to the future, he sees an opportunity for the center to revamp its curriculum to provide a more holistic approach to environmental education.
"We want to kind of redesign, reimagine the curriculum for the next generation of kids," says Cullison, "And connect what we do here to those larger statewide themes, larger global themes. We’re talking about climate change. How do our actions here in Hawaii impact the climate and how do we teach those?" says Cullison, "Again, I go back to that building blocks, you know, by teaching these native plants, the trees, flora and fauna, the water cycle. We think that that will lead to a better understanding of these other themes as they get older."
